Relief India Trust Role in Poverty Alleviation Introduction: Poverty has always been a big concern in both rural and urban areas. Particularly rural areas suffer a lot more due to the extreme shortage of resources and also the opportunities. The poor people have the keenness to overcome their poverty, but they couldn’t do so due to insufficient resources available for them. This is where the role of an NGO comes into play. The Relief India Trust has always been in the front for helping poor people to alleviate poverty. NGOs approach in alleviating Poverty: Alleviating poverty is a long term process and you can’t get good results in a few days. Ideally, the NGOs should start their work for eradicating poverty by setting short term goals. The NGOs like Relief India Trust has a very versatile approach when it comes to the services required for alleviating poverty in any region. The two distinct approaches used by almost all the NGOs are: 1. Supply side 2. Demand Side The supply side means that the NGO works to provide the poor people with the basic public services. The demand side can vary from place to place and it requires NGOs be flexible enough to accommodate the demands of a certain area where the NGOs are working. Factors that keep poor people trapped into poverty: The poor also get trapped into a lot of other things which don’t allow them to come out of poverty. The factors which can trap the poor in poverty for long can be as follows: •
Diseases – It is a big trap which always keeps them in a negative frame of mind and their willingness to overcome poverty goes in the background.
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Climate – The severe weather conditions can further add to the stress of poor people. They feel very weak and helpless when they can’t even protect themselves from the extreme weather condition.
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Environmental Degradation – The factor of environmental degradation and inability of the poor people to natural resources like air, water and soil etc get them into a further bad state where they find themselves helpless with less chances of survival or improvement in their condition.
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Physical Isolation – It is a very painful and hard thing to digest when we see that poor people get physically isolated from the wealthy people and sometimes the poor people themselves think that they do not belong to this wealthy world. This class divides shatters their self confidence big time and despite the availability of some resources, they still can’t manage to alleviate their poverty and miserable physical state.
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Extreme Poverty – Extreme poverty itself is a big trap and the people going through severe poverty conditions lose hope of any form of improvement.
These factors significantly affect the thinking and willingness of poor people to alleviate their poverty. The NGOs don’t only need to provide them with resources, but also work out a strategy that how they could help poor people to break these traps for their better and a much wealthier future. The Relief India Trust always has the poverty trapping factors in their charter or things-to-do list whenever they are devising their strategy for poverty alleviation in any area.